Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests.

What could be wrong with demanding proof of identity? Plenty.

As Republican strategists are fully aware, minorities are overrepresented among the estimated 11 percent of citizens who do not have a government-issued photo ID. They are also painfully aware that in 2008, President Obama won 95 percent of the African-American vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. It doesn't take a genius to do the math: If you can reduce the number of black and Latino voters, you improve the Republican candidate's chances.

If photo ID laws were going to be the solution, though, Republicans had to invent a problem. The best they could come up with was The Menace of Widespread Voter Fraud.

There is no Widespread Voter Fraud. All available evidence indicates that fraudulent voting of the kind that photo ID laws would presumably prevent  someone shows up at the polls and votes in someone else's name  just doesn't happen.

For a while, the GOP pointed to South Carolina, where Republican Gov. Nikki Haley said that "dead people" had somehow cast ballots in recent elections. But then the state's election commission investigated claims of 953 zombie voters. The number of voters came from a crude comparison of records done by the state's Department of Motor Vehicles. The elections commission actually found 207 contested votes. Of that total, 106 reflected clerical errors by poll workers, 56 reflected errors by the motor vehicles department, 32 involved people who were mistakenly listed as having voted, and three involved people who had cast absentee ballots and then died before Election Day.

That left 10 contested votes  count 'em, 10  that could not be immediately resolved. However, the commission found no evidence of fraud. Or of zombies.

Of course, there are other potential kinds of electoral fraud; crooked poll workers, for example, could record votes in the names of citizens who actually stayed home. Election officials could design ballots in a way that worked to a specific candidate's advantage or disadvantage (see Florida, 2000). But none of this would be prevented by photo ID.

Even more sinister are new laws, such as in Florida, that make it much more difficult for campaigns  or anyone else  to conduct voter-registration drives. If you thought Republicans and Democrats agreed that more Americans should register to vote, you were sadly mistaken.

Florida requires that groups conducting registration drives be vetted and that registration forms be submitted within 48 hours of when they are signed  an onerous and unnecessary burden that only serves to hamper anyone seeking to expand the electorate.

In the name of safeguarding the sanctity of the ballot, Republicans are trying to exclude citizens they consider likely to vote for Democrats  the young, the poor, the black and brown. Those who love democracy cannot allow this foul subterfuge to succeed.

If dead voters are on the voter rolls, that means the system for removing them is broken. But, hey, let's add a whole new layer of bureacracy and impediments to our voting system! That will fix it! Why fix the existing system?

The more we complicate government the more efficiently it functions! That is what the Right apparently believes these days.

Somehow democrats get away with insulting the Black community by claiming that Black people are incapable of obtaining a photo I.D. in the 21st century. Photo ID is necessary to function in modern life for everything from cashing a check to driving a car to entering a government building. Here's how the voter fraud works. Criminal activists like ACORN register names that don't exist or street people who would never vote or illegal aliens or ex-convicts or residents of cemeteries. When election day comes they go from polling place to polling place and vote in place of the people they registered. The scam becomes difficult when they have to produce a photo I.D..

That left 10 contested votes  count 'em, 10  that could not be immediately resolved. However, the commission found no evidence of fraud. Or of zombies.

Of course, there are other potential kinds of electoral fraud; crooked poll workers, for example, could record votes in the names of citizens who actually stayed home. Election officials could design ballots in a way that worked to a specific candidate's advantage or disadvantage (see Florida, 2000). But none of this would be prevented by photo ID.

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Correct.

Of course, the right will fill this thread with their ignorance and paranoid delusions of voter fraud, absent any evidence of fraud whatsoever.

Somehow democrats get away with insulting the Black community by claiming that Black people are incapable of obtaining a photo I.D. in the 21st century. Photo ID is necessary to function in modern life for everything from cashing a check to driving a car to entering a government building. Here's how the voter fraud works. Criminal activists like ACORN register names that don't exist or street people who would never vote or illegal aliens or ex-convicts or residents of cemeteries. When election day comes they go from polling place to polling place and vote in place of the people they registered. The scam becomes difficult when they have to produce a photo I.D..

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Quit presenting fables as a valid excuse for disfranchisement, no republican can point to any evidence that there is a problem big enough to warrant making it harder for people to vote. ACORN does not even exist anymore, it is as dead as Elvis, talk about zombie threats.

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